The United Nations official responsible for aiding Syrian refugees painted his bleakest picture to date Tuesday, describing a humanitarian crisis that is “dramatic beyond description" and a country and people so destroyed that they could take years to recover under the best of circumstances. In addition to 3.6 million people internally displaced by Syria's civil war, registered refugees in the four neighboring countries now total 1.1 million, compared with just 33,000 last April, U.N. High Commissioner for Refugees Antonio Guterres said in congressional testimony. At least half a million more who have fled Syria are unregistered, he said. By the end of this year, Guterres said, his organization expects 1 million refugees each in Turkey, Jordan and Lebanon, a situation that will have “an unimaginable impact on the economy, the society and the security of these countries."
